They came running from their yard when they saw me. Bam Bam sat up close as I directed Berta and Betty in acrobatics. They did cartwheels around the rim of my yard, then crisscrossed each other in a big X, doing back flips. They did the routine over and over until they got the timing right and wound up in front of me at exactly the same moment. Then I taught them to curtsy, their arms curved like the necks of swans. I swear, the two of them would’ve made it to the Olympics if their aunt would only push them.
It was just getting dark when Berta and Betty’s aunt stood on her back stoop and called, “Beeertaaa, Beeetteeey.” If she looked my way, she would’ve seen them, but she didn’t. Just stood on her stoop, round like an apple, with her hands cupped to her mouth, then went back in the house. Berta and Betty stopped dead in their tracks. The screen door slammed like a gunshot. They took off and didn’t look back. They never said goodbye.
I heard Bam Bam rustling under the bush and making that whiny noise he did. I’d lost track of him, and now his knees were caked with dirt and there was snot dried on his face. “Crying out loud, Bam Bam,” I said. “Doesn’t your aunt ever wash you?” He smiled a slit smile and wagged his head back and forth real fast. “Want me to wash your face for you, Bammerang?” He kept shaking his head back and forth. I took a rag and loaded it with suds then washed his face like I was polishing a car. He squirmed around and squealed. It’s not that I was a nut for cleanliness. That was my mother. I think it was more that Bam Bam was the type of kid people naturally liked to torture—like the neighborhood psychopath, Andrew, who could chase Bam Bam with a willow whip for hours.
Bam Bam pointed at the refrigerator, turned his palms up next to his shoulders, then shrugged them to his ears. He had some cute ways about him. You know how they say retarded people are closer to God? I believed that about Bam Bam. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body, and his life was pretty grim. I think his aunt wished he’d just disappear, get kidnapped or run over by a truck or something. You never heard her calling, “Berta, Betty, Bam Bam.”
It was late, near nine o‘clock, and I was trying hard to keep my mind off of Raymond so I wouldn’t get furious. I got Bam Bam a Ring Ding Jr. and poured him a glass of strawberry Kool-Aid, then I sat at the table across from him with my Ring Ding and glass of Kool-Aid and he did like Simon Says. He peeled the wrapper exactly like me, then held the round chocolate thing with his pointer finger and thumb the same as me. Then I licked under it to be sure it wasn’t my imagination, and he licked it too. Bam Bam cracked me up.
It was pitch-black out; a breeze was kicking up and whipping the shades against the windows. I was spooked and glad Bam Bam was there. “Hey, Bam,” I said. “You want to dance?” He nodded his head up and down fast. I put
Sgt
.
Pepper
on the stereo. I was careful not to lift my arms up high because my mother was always warning me that I’d strangle the baby with the umbilical cord. So I twirled and swayed my gigantic hips and Bam Bam did little hops and wiggled his head.
I collapsed exhausted and sweaty in the rocker.
Bam Bam tried to climb on my lap.
I didn’t want him to touch me. “Get off,” I said.
He made like he’d start crying.
“Don’t you cry, Bammer, or I won’t let you in anymore. Hear me? You better go now.” I opened the front door. He just stood there. “Bam Bam,” I said with forced patience.
He bent his chin to his chest and crouched down like an ape. When he finally passed through, I locked the door and headed upstairs. He banged his head on the screen, “Bam … bam, bam … bam,” he said.
I screamed, “Bam Bam, get lost. I mean it!”
I ran up the stairs and sat on the edge of our bed and stared out the window in the dark. I spotted Bam Bam sitting in the gutter a few feet down the road, swishing sand with a stick and rubbing his eye with the back of his hand. I felt bad kicking him out, but I didn’t want to call him back, either.
Just then a car approached in a whoosh of light and I thought maybe it was my mother. It was Raymond. He slammed the door a little too hard.
His feet made a lot of noise on the floor. He called, “Beverly.”
I didn’t answer.
“Fuck,” he said.
He opened the refrigerator door and closed it. I heard the water go on. He walked up the stairs, took a piss in the bathroom. I held my breath. He looked in the room and said, “What’re you doing?”
“You should have called.”
He leaned against the door frame. He smelled of cigarettes and booze. “That guy, Sal? Got laid off. He didn’t expect it, either. Some of us guys went down the Aviation for some drinks to make him feel better.”
I laid down on my stomach and started to cry.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I lied. The matter was I wanted my mother.
I had big plans for my marriage. They went something like this: My friends come over every night. We have pajama parties and play music as loud as we want. Instead, like I said, they deserted me to Spring Lake. where they had new and changing boyfriends, went skinny-dipping and floating on inner tubes, and never thought of inviting me, because I was pregnant. The only girlfriends who called me up were Virginia, who would be going to college in the fall and had to stay in Wallingford to work for the summer, and Fay, because she was married now too. She’d married the guy from the nuclear submarine the day after graduation, as planned.
Finally, my friends invited us to a huge party. Ray and I drove Virginia and Bobby, who would be leaving for boot camp in a couple of weeks. Everybody would be there except for Fay, because she was visiting her in-laws in Virginia. By the time of the party, it had been positively confirmed that Fay had conceived on her honeymoon. I was ecstatic that now I wouldn’t be the only mother.
I could think of nothing but the party for weeks. I was sure everybody would be shocked to see how fat I’d grown and that they’d make a big fuss over me. But my girlfriends seemed different. For one thing, their skin was tanned, and for another, they were surrounded by guys I’d never laid eyes on. There were empty beer cans and scotch bottles overflowing from garbage bags in comers. Beatrice, who used to think she was ugly, was wearing tight hiphuggers and a low-cut jersey. She was with a guy named Donnie, who’d just come back from Vietnam, where he’d been a para medic. But his last three months all he did was load bodies in plastic bags onto planes. Beatrice told me this in the bathroom while she plucked her eyebrows. “I’m such a mess, Beverly. I’ve been drunk for a month.”
“Really?”
“We have beer for breakfast. Beer and toast.”
“You’re lucky.”
“I’m broke. I spent all my graduation money. We all are. In two weeks I start at the Knights of Columbus with my mother. I don’t want to go back to Wallingford. You’re lucky you don’t have to work.”
“I know.”
No one made a fuss about my hugeness, so after my third rum and Coke, I lifted my shirt up in the kitchen to show off my belly. People gathered around to touch it. “What does it feel like?” they wanted to know.
“Heavy. I get backaches and heartburn.”
“Ugh.”
“But it moves. Sometimes you can see it under my skin.”
“How weird.”
Then I got drunk, noticed this beautiful guy walk in the door, and forgot myself. I asked him to dance. We did the Jerk and I forgot all about the umbilical cord and fetus strangulation and that I was even pregnant. I closed my eyes and really got into it. I imagined he was watching me and wishing I wasn’t married. I imagined that if I weren’t married, I would dance with this guy for the rest of the night. Then we’d go outside and talk by the lake. He’d be from a different town. We’d go there and I’d meet new people. I felt his hand on my arm and opened my eyes. “Won’t you hurt the baby?” he said.
I turned and walked through the kitchen and out the back door, stunned. I sat on the ground between two parked cars until I was sure I wouldn’t cry, then I looked for Raymond. He was leaning against a car. He took the last swig of a beer, then squashed the can in his fist and burped. He was with Armond White, who was home on leave from the army.
“You’re drunk,” I said when I stood next to Raymond.
“Tell me one thing,” Ray said. “We were just talking. How do you lose my socks in the wash? What the hell happens to them?”
“You’ve had too much to drink,” I said.
“Ah, come on.”
“I want to go home.”
“We just got here.”
“Why don’t you leave the guy alone?” Armond said. I had a longstanding gripe with Armond. He was the moron who told Raymond that if you had sex more than once in twenty-four hours then you were safe after the first time. I knew Armond was stupid, like most of Raymond’s friends, but I believed him because I thought they taught guys all about birth control in the army.
“Mind your own business, Armond,” I said.
“You let your wife talk like that, man?”
“Let your wife? I talk however the fuck I please.”
“Nice language.”
“Raymond.” I thought I’d murder him if he didn’t walk away with me that instant.
“You think you’re pretty tough, huh?” said Armond. “Remember, tough cookies crumble.”
“All over your face.”
“Beverly, come on.” Raymond hugged me from behind and pinned my arms to my sides as he walked me away backward.
“You have such assholes for friends,” I said.
“So? I’m an asshole,” Ray said.
“Let’s go home.”
“I’m having fun. We never have fun anymore. Don’t let’s leave yet. Please? Besides, what about Bobby and Virginia?”
“How can you even talk to somebody so stupid? I’m so tired.”
“You’re always tired. You hate my friends. We never have any fun.” He tried to kiss me on the neck. “Come on, Bevy. All your friends are here. You been looking forward to this for weeks. Why aren’t you having fun?”
“If we stay longer you’ll get drunker.”
“I promise. If we stay another two hours, I won’t drink anymore. Maybe one beer.”
“One hour.”
“All right.”
One hour later I couldn’t find him. An hour after that, I found him lying on his back on top of a picnic table by the lake. Drunk. I told him I wanted to go home.
“I want to go home. I want to go home. You know who you sound like? What’s her name in The Wizard of Oz.” He thought that was a riot.
“You said only one beer.”
He sat up and swayed so far to the right he almost fell off the table. I felt like hitting him. “Give me the keys,” I said.
He dug in his pockets, then shook his head up from his chest. “What am I doing? No way. You’re really something.” He pointed his thumb at me. “The big boss. Everybody thinks I’m pussy-whipped. That’s why I got drunk.”
“I’m going,” I said, and started walking toward home, which was fifty miles away. The road was dark and deserted. I passed the little stand, closed now, where the year before I’d sat on a picnic table and flirted with some college guys who’d asked me if I was a nonconformist, a word I’d never heard. I’d walked nearly a mile and was not only getting cold but scared, because the trees made an arch over my head and blocked off the moonlight, when Raymond finally pulled up with Virginia and Bobby in the backseat. “You walked far,” he said.
“I’m freezing,” I said.
“Get in, baby,” he said.
“Let me drive.”
“Please, Bev?”
I felt sorry for him. I could be a bitch. Plus, I didn’t want to make a scene in front of Virginia and Bobby, who’d seen too many already, so I got in and ignored his weaving all over the road. About ten minutes later, Raymond nodded out and our VW flipped like a pancake. Sand chimed around me and time slowed down as I thought, Now, at last, I’ll lose the baby.
Then everything was still and silent. Virginia said, “Bobby?”
“I’m all right,” he said.
“Beverly?” she said.
“I’m okay,” I said as I squeezed myself out of the upside-down car. Bobby and Virginia looked dazed standing a foot apart staring. The only sound was the whir of wheels spinning. “Where’s Ray?” Bobby said after a minute. It was strange we’d forgotten him.
We walked like zombies to the other side of the car. Raymond was lying on the ground, unconscious, with the car door resting on his shoulder and a big blob of blood gelling on the asphalt under his nose.
“Do you think it’s his brain?” I said.
Bobby put his ear to Ray’s chest. “He’s alive,” he said.
We walked across the street and banged on a door. A woman’s voice yelled, “Get out of here before I call the cops.”
Bobby said, “Fuck you, lady.”
At the next house, the woman called an ambulance and we went back to the car to wait.
“Goddamn!” Bobby kicked a fender.
“Bobby, don‘t,” Virginia said, because Bobby could get crazy.
“That’s my buddy,” Bobby said. “Look at him, man.”
I couldn’t. Neither could Virginia.
At the hospital they wheeled Ray away, then a doctor examined me. He listened to my stomach with a stethoscope and said the baby seemed fine. Then he bandaged my knee and my forehead where it had hit the windshield and told me I could go home. Bobby and Virginia got picked up by Virginia’s father, and I hung around to wait for Ray to get out of X rays. His eyes were black-and-blue and opened. When he saw me, he started crying.
“His collarbone and his nose are broken,” a nurse told me.
“I should’ve let you drive,” Raymond cried.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“I could’ve killed you. I love you so much.”
“I love you too. Don’t cry.”
The nurse rolled him away sobbing.
“You all right?” my father said when I called home for a ride. I’d been praying I’d get my mother.
“Yes.”
“Him?”
“Broken collarbone and nose.”